Different connections in a wireless network may have different needs in terms of: type of traffic to be communicated, amount of traffic to communicate, priority of the traffic to be communicated, latency requirements, and/or error rate tolerances. In addition, different wireless terminals or users may have purchased different provisioning service level plans from a service provider. Traffic loading conditions can also be expected to vary over time and from one location to another. There is typically a fixed amount of air link resources in a local region available to be scheduled for traffic signaling.
In a peer to peer communications network such as an ad-hoc network, where a centralized control node is not available to monitor activity, establish connections, and perform overall coordination, there is a need for new and innovative methods and apparatus to support the identification of regional activity and establish connections.
In a peer to peer communications network, where boundaries are not clearly defined, one would like to be able to reuse as much of the traffic air link resources as possible in adjacent regions without creating intolerable interference levels. In systems such as ad-hoc peer to peer networks, where there is no centralized scheduling node, it becomes problematic to allocate air link resources, e.g., traffic channel air link resources in an efficient manner.
Compounding the problem of the assignment of a traffic segment in a local region to a particular connection, among which various connections concurrently desire to use the same segment, is the problem that different connections may be associated with different resource needs. Allocating the same fixed amount of resources to each connection, whether it be control resources, e.g., traffic transmission request resources, or traffic transmissions resources, e.g., traffic segments, is inefficient and wasteful.
Based on the above discussion, there is also a need for new and improved methods and apparatus for supporting differentiated qualities of service in a wireless communications system, e.g., in an ad-hoc peer to peer wireless communications system in which scheduling decisions are made in a distributed manner.